Handbook of Home Rule eBook

I am very familiar with the controversy with them,
for I have taken some part in it ever since the passage
of the reconstruction Acts, and I know very well how
they felt, and am sometimes greatly impressed by the
similarity between their arguments and those of the
opponents of Irish Home Rule. One of their fixed
beliefs for many years, though it is now extinct,
was that Southerners were so bent on rebelling again,
and were generally so prone to rebellion, that the
awful consequences of their last attempt in the loss
of life and property, had made absolutely no impression
on them. The Southerner was, in fact, in their
eyes, what Mr. Gladstone says the Irishman is in the
eyes of some Englishmen: “A lusus naturae;
that justice, common sense, moderation, national prosperity
had no meaning for him; that all he could appreciate
was strife and perpetual dissension. It was for
many years useless to point out to them the severity
of the lesson taught by the Civil War as to the physical
superiority of the North, or the necessity of peace
and quiet to enable the new generation of Southerners
to restore their fortunes, or even gain a livelihood.
Nor was it easy to impress them with the inconsistency
of arguing that it was slavery which made Southerners
what they were before they went to war, and maintaining
at the same time that the disappearance of slavery
would produce no change in their manners, ideas, or
opinions. All this they answered by pointing to
speeches delivered by some fiery adorer of “the
lost cause,” to the Ku-Klux outrages, to political
murders, like that of Chisholm, to the building of
monuments to the Confederate dead, or to some newspaper
expression of reverence for Confederate nationality.
In fact, for fully ten years after the close of the
war the collection of Southern “outrages”
and their display before Northern audiences, was the
chief work of Republican politicians. In 1876,
during the Hayes-Tilden canvass, the opening speech
which furnished what is called “the key-note
of the campaign” was made by Mr. Wheeler, the
Republican candidate for the Vice-Presidency, and
his advice to the Vermonters, to whom it was delivered,
was “to vote as they shot,” that is, to
go to the polls with the same feelings and aims as
those with which they enlisted in the war.

I need hardly tell English readers how all this has
ended. The withdrawal of the Federal troops from
the South by President Hayes, and the consequent complete
restoration of the State governments to the discontented
whites, have fully justified the expectations of those
who maintained that it is no less true in politics
than in physics, that if you remove what you see to
be the cause, the effect will surely disappear.
It is true, at least in the Western world, that if
you give communities in a reasonable degree the management
of their own affairs, the love of material comfort
and prosperity which is now so strong among all civilized,
and even partially civilized men, is sure in the long
run to do the work of creating and maintaining order;
or, as Mr. Gladstone has expressed it, in setting
up a government, “the best and surest foundation
we can find to build on is the foundation afforded
by the affections, the convictions, and the will of
men.”